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I attended Google I/O for the first time in May 2017 and had an absolute blast! It is by far the best conference I’ve attended. Google listened to the gripes of last year’s I/O at Shoreline and fixed all the niggles. But what does it costs to attend? I’d estimated a total cost of around £2K after totalling up receipts, I’m reasonably happy to see that I was near in the estimate.

Of course this is highly individual based on my experiences this year and current USD to GBP ratio but I hope it serves as indicator for others. Here’s the rough and rounded the numbers.

Flights LHR to SFO: ~£450

Airport transfers UK: £50

Airport transfers US: £60

AirBnb (split between 4): £350

Taxi/Uber to/from Shoreline: £55

Other food/beer (not at I/O): £150

I/O Ticket price £950*

Total: ~£2065

*Disclaimer: As an GDE for Android I am fortunate to get a complementary I/O ticket. However I thought this article would be more useful if I included the ticket price in the main total.

Factors/Comments:

I was able to share uber a few times to cut down some of the travel costs.

Didn’t factor lost earnings for the 5 days not working (or the reduced efficiency the week after with jet lag)

Haven’t included some leisure activities at weekend like bike hire, Makers faire and travelling to/from San Francisco as I figured it’s purely what I got up to and not indicative of costs for others.

Tips and tricks to cut costs:

Remembers it’s near unlimited free food, drink, snacks and beer/wine at Google I/O so on a I/O day you shouldn’t need much else.

After researching flights, I discovered you can fly into San Francisco (SFO) or San Jose (SJC). SJC is closer but SFO is often cheaper. I did a fair bit of checking of different flight options to get the flights for £450. This is £200 cheaper than LHR to SJC

Also see if flying back on different day helps, I found that returning on the Sunday night saved £1000!!! Over flight on the Friday evening.

Book accommodation nearer to bus drop off locations i.e Mountain view caltrain. This is so I could take advance of the free Google I/O buses.